[AGL] for my english lit friends

[Connie Clark]

Well I didn't know that a marble made a plash, not a splash, but the rest of them I've heard before - arrant - for some reason hardly ever see it in print.


Jan. 24, 2007, 9:49AM
Hard words in famous 'kid' story

By LEON HALE
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle 

One of the customers has asked whatever happened to the hard-word tests we used to have here every few months.
What happened is that I stopped those tests because the customers kept complaining that they didn't like them, that the words were way too uppity and the average reader didn't have any use for them.
I always liked those tests. Don't worry, though, I'm not about to start them up again.
But now and then one of the customers who also liked the tests will mail me a word quiz and invite me to see how I do on it.
The most recent came from Georgia Herreth of Bay City. She was reading what she calls a well-known children's story, written by a famous author, and she was impressed by the vocabulary. So am I.
I'm not sure I agree that this yarn qualifies strictly as a children's story. I doubt many 10-year-olds would get past the first couple of paragraphs.
My best recollection is that I was exposed to it in junior high school, or maybe in high school a year or so later, and my bunch was a long way from adulthood then. So it's not wrong to call it a children's story but it's more than that. It's a classic.
Anyhow, Georgia Herreth sent me 20 words from the story, and invited me to see how many on the list I know. Surely a guy in the word business would be familiar with all the words in a story studied by multitudes of young students, right?
Wrong. Nine words on the list were strange to me:
Roystering. Rantipole. Gorget. Queued. Ratiocination. Arrant. Plashy. Choleric. Withe.
That string of sweethearts sent me into Webster's Third New International, and I was in there a considerable while.
Start with roystering. Dictionary says, "Characterized by or associated with noisy revelry." Webster likes the word spelled with an i rather than that y.
Rantipole. "A wild, reckless, sometimes quarrelsome person." So you might become a rantipole if you went out roystering.
Gorget is the name of a piece of armor protecting the throat. Also an ornamental collar, a scarf, or a splash of color at the throat, especially of a bird.
Queued. Did this one fool you? It did me. It's nothing but the past tense of the verb queue, meaning to get in line. Queue has an oddball appearance to begin with, and when you add that d the word looks like leftovers in an alphabet soup bowl.
Ratiocination. Which means logical and methodical reasoning. Maybe I'd have nailed that one if I could have seen it used in a sentence, but I don't have before me a copy of the story.
Arrant. This is an adjective that doesn't get around much any more. Dictionaries say it means "completely such." Like if you have a neighbor who's a total, purebred and registered scoundrel, he's an arrant scoundrel.
Plashy. Mr. Webster says this means "abounding with pools or puddles." It can also mean "marked by plashes," which are small splashes. If you do a cannon ball into the swimming pool you'll make a splash, but if you drop a marble into it you'll just cause a plash.
Choleric. I figured surely this one has to do with bad health because it certainly looks like a sick word. But when used outside a hospital, it means "easily moved to anger." Hot tempered, that is.
Withe. A withe turns out to be a slender, flexible branch or twig used for winding around things, to bind them.
Some of the other words in that children's story were pedagogue, peradventure, ferule, mettle, syllogism, tractable, pertinacious and approbation. I'm sure you're familiar with all those and use them daily in casual speech, so I won't bother with definitions.
Due to the hints I've dropped, some of the customers may have already seen that the story in question is Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, starring Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman. It was first published in 1820.
Who knows what age reader Irving had in mind when he wrote this story? If he was aiming at children, he sure didn't worry about writing down to them.
Since I began this I've seen a Web site called Edsitement that offers teachers a lesson plan on the Sleepy Hollow story. Plan suggests that students be divided into groups, to help each other deal with Irving's vocabulary.
http://blogs.chron.com/leonhale


 
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